Ben Fountain’s debut novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, has been described by author and Vietnam veteran Karl Marlantes as the Catch 22 of the Iraq War — and it won America’s National Critics Circle award for fiction in March this year. This prestigious award is judged — as the prize name suggests — solely by critics, who said Fountain’s novel was “a wise, sharply insightful examination of war, class, and celebrity in America”. I concur with their assessment.
Billy Lynn is a 19-year-old soldier involved in a firefight in Iraq that is captured on film by an embedded cameraman. After the footage goes viral, Billy and the surviving members of Bravo Squadron are brought home by the Bush administration for a two-week “Victory Tour”.
Towards the end of the tour, at a Dallas Cowboys match during Thanksgiving, the young men are paraded about and lauded, for yet another time, as heroes. It’s crazy and confusing. The squad lost a member during the firefight and, to Billy, the adulation seems hollow.
“It’s kind of weird,” says Billy, “Being honoured for the worst day of your life.”
As the day at Texas Stadium with the Cowboys progresses, we see through Billy’s constantly-assessing eyes the fawning vacuity of the American public and the obscenities of such a promotional tour.
“No one spits, no one calls him a baby-killer. On the contrary, people could not be more supportive or kindlier disposed. Yet Billy finds these encounters weird and frightening all the same. There’s something harsh in his fellow Americans, avid, ecstatic, a burning that comes of the deepest need. That’s his sense of it, they all need something from him, this pack of half-rich lawyers, dentists, soccer moms, and corporate VPs, they’re all gnashing for a piece of a barely grown grunt making $14,800 a year.”
The farce reaches fever pitch when the Bravos are scripted into the match’s halftime show alongside the superstar pop group Destiny’s and amid cheerleaders and sexy dancers. Simultaneously: A Hollywood producer called Albert Ratner is trying to close a movie deal for the squad; Billy’s sister Kathryn is trying to convince him to go AWOL; and Billy has been bowled over by a cheerleader and thinks it might be love.
War abroad and at home
There are scenes at Billy’s home in Stovall, Texas, that also show clearly the “disconnect” between the war abroad and the war at home.
Neighbours drop by and drool, revealing their hunger for war as spectator sport.
“Edwin! I yelled, come quick! Billy Lynn’s on TV and he’s taking out a whole mess of al-Qaedas! Nice people but they did go on, and so fierce about the war! They were transformed at such moments, talking about war — their eyes bugged out, their necks bulged, their voices grew husky with bloodlust. Billy wondered about them then, the practical appetites in these good Christian folk, or maybe this was just their way of being polite, of showing how much they appreciated him. So he smiled his modest hero’s smile and waited for them to leave so he and his sisters could go back to drinking beer.”
As one would expect from cannon fodder, the squad’s language is ripe and profane.
Billy’s voice is part grunt and part philosopher; sharp, funny and incisive but also touchingly teenage at times.
In other words, he might swear like a trooper but he’s streetwise and still very endearing.
Death haunts him
Unusually-spelled war words like terrRr, nina leven and soooh-preeme sacrifice are scattered on some pages of the book like poetry or, as I thought in one of my darker moments, dead bodies.
These scatterings are a clever touch.
Cleverness aside, Billy has stared death in the face and it’s haunting him.
“Yes,” Billy said, “I think about him [Shroom, the squad member who died] a lot.” Like, every day. Every hour. No, every couple of minutes. About once every ten seconds, actually. No, it’s more like an imprint on his retina that’s always there, Shroom alive and alert, then dead, alive, dead, alive, dead, his face eternally flipping back and forth.”
Billy can see through the bulldust and blather of the “Victory Tour”. He can see how the Bravos and the war are really being used to sell sport — and this with little dispute from journalists.
“Tomorrow he’ll read the newspaper and wonder why this, too, isn’t part of the story: that the press, however grudgingly gathered as instructed to record in its stenographic capacity Norm’s presentation of Bravo Squad, a blatantly formulaic marketing event that enlightened no one, revealed nothing, and served no tangible purpose other than to big-up awareness of the Cowboys brand.”
It is Billy’s sister, Kathryn who points out to him the ironies and duplicity of conservatism.
“You know what’s funny,” she said, “everybody around here’s such a major conservative till they get sick, get screwed over by their insurance company, their job goes over to China or whatever, then they’re like, oooh, what happened? I thought America was just the greatest country ever and I’m such a good person, why is all this terrible shit happening to me? And I was one of ’em man. Just as stupid as the rest. I never thought anything bad would happen to me, or if it did there was a system that would make it all right.”
Kathryn also nags her brother to get out of the squad before he is killed and, although Billy has learned through war to value life, he is still faced with a moral dilemma. Should he stay and risk his own life to support his squadron — the boys he’s fought beside, become close to and would feel terrible letting down, more so than family? Or should he leave and put an end to his requirement to kill others?
Ben Fountain is an accomplished short story writer and has won the Pushcart Prize and an O. Henry. His first book Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award and established him as an international literary force.
Some say Fountain’s first novel is belatedly damning of Bush’s America. I say it’s a war story with a difference. You won’t be peppered with depictions of battle scenes but you will feel layers of thoughts and questions coming at you like an advancing battalion. Open your ears to Billy Lynn — and his candid and original take on being a decorated soldier in the US military — as he walks his way on in.
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